The society of experience – the direct commodification of our experience itself.

What we are buying on the market are less and less products,
(material objects) that we want to own,
and more and more ‘life experiences’
experiences of sex, eating, communicating,
cultural consumption, participating in a lifestyle…
‘we become consumers of our own lives.’
We no longer buy objects;
we ultimately buy the time of our own life.
…I buy my bodily fitness by visiting fitness clubs;
I buy my spiritual enlightenment
by enrolling in classes on transcendental meditation;
I buy satisfactory self-experience of myself as ecologically aware
by purchasing only organic fruit, etc.

These activities may have beneficial effects,
their main importance is clearly ideological.

Excerpt The Courage of Hopelessness
By Slavoj Zizek p. 27

---

We stayed in Manhattan last night.  The Bonvoy Hotel was totally delightful, a welcome respite after several very long days of road from New Mexico up through Ohio, Pennsylvania and now to New York.  We skirted around the cities for the most part, seeing the silhouette of skyscrapers against the skyline.

In Pennsylvania the deliveries of antique carousel animals commenced, stopping off at museums that were to receive the donations.  The animals have already brought delight, the intimation that life is wonderful, meaningful to generations of children who mounted the backs of the carved wooden, brightly painted animals and rode them around the carousel.  They will continue to convey the same message as part of the collections displayed by the recipient museums.  I will remember the delight and the interest with with the animals were first viewed by the curators and conservators on staff at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  The work of master carver Daniel Muller who lived in Philadelphia will live on.

On the road in Pennsylvania I glanced at a road side indicating the nearby Brandywine Revolutionary War battle field.  I thought of our ancestors and how their lives revolved around basic needs: enough food, adequate shelter, safe community, etc.  So much has changed over the last two hundred years.  The dissemination of knowledge means that these basic needs have been met for a generation or more, for many of us.  The focus for a American citizen who lives in one of our cities as become the achievement of a particular lifestyle, the purchase of experiences.  This fact is captured in the quotation of Slavoj Zizek’s words.  What a sea change this represents from the mind set of our ancestors.

Thus we are further separated from the raw texture of Nature, the link that we have as biological beings, mammals to the earth, by our knowledge and our affluence due to technology.  The concern no longer need be shelter, food, and basic safety.

Somehow the handling of these antique carousel horses has served as a reminder that there is nothing more important than the laughter of a child as he/she feels the rotation of the carousel and the up and down motion of a exquisitely carved animal.